Fox

Alice Oswald, British born 1966

from Falling Awake, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Mt. Cuba, Hockessin Delaware, 2018.

Legacy of the Lammot du Pont Copelands

 

 

I heard a cough

as if a thief was there

outside my sleep

a sharp intake of air

 

a fox in her fox-fur

stepping across 

the grass in her black gloves

barked at my house

 

just so abrupt and odd

the way she went

hungrily asking

in the heart’s thick accent

 

 

Gibraltar, Wilmington, Delaware, 2022

 

 

in such serious sleepless

trespass she came

a woman with a man’s voice

but no name

 

as if to say:  it’s midnight

and my life

is laid beneath my children

like gold leaf

 

 

 

Fragment of a gold wreath, Greek, 330-320 BCE, sheet gold, from a tomb in the Crimea on the northern shore of the Black Sea. 

On display at the Metropolitan Museum, NY in 2019 on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC